Potter’s House church upgrades to SSL Live
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Most recently, the audio system has undergone a significant upgrade with the installation of three Dante-networked Solid State Logic Live L550 digital mixing consoles, positioned at front-of-house, monitors and in the church’s broadcast centre.
“As our ministry has grown over the years and we’ve started to do a lot of stuff that’s outside of the norm, we started to run into walls because we just couldn’t do it with our previous consoles. We have 160 or 170 inputs at times, and we were starting to run into input challenges,” says production manager and front-of-house engineer William B. Barnett. “So, as we’ve grown, and our technical prowess has grown, we decided we wanted a console that could do a little more, that sounds amazing and has more inputs.”
The three SSL Live L550 desks offer a noticeable improvement both in operational capabilities and in the system’s sound quality compared to the previous consoles, says Barnett. “If you have to have a bunch of plug-ins to make your console sound decent then that’s an issue. So we said, let’s look at a console that sounds incredible, operates at 96 kHz, has mic preamps with great gain, and is a fairly easy platform to use but has expansive programming.”
The 191,000sq.ft main sanctuary at the church’s Dallas campus, built and opened in 2000, can accommodate as many as 8,000 worshippers and is equipped with a Sound Bridge Acoustic Labs Xyon line array system powered by Lab.gruppen and Powersoft amplification with Dolby LM26 processing.
To cover the large expanse of tiered seating, the PA is configured with left and right out-fills, front fills, under-balcony and upper balcony delay speakers in addition to the main left and right hangs. There are also feeds to the building’s public areas, such as hallways and restrooms, plus a translation feed.
“With the previous FOH console, says Barnett, “We were doing a combination of matrix outputs from the console and having to group some stuff because there weren’t enough outputs. But with the SSL, everything is driven off of the Live console’s matrix because we have so many outputs.”
